- A handful of Neocons are instigating a wider war. Will
Americans join Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians as neocon victims?
-
- What explains the indifference of the Bush administration
to the slaughter of civilians in Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza?
-
- As of the morning of July 19, Israeli bombardments of
Lebanese civilian residential districts and public infrastructure have
murdered 300 Lebanese, wounded 1,000, and displaced 500,000. The Lebanese
prime minister said that Israel's attack has caused "unimaginable
losses" and that his government will seek compensation from Israel.
-
- In Gaza, Israel has murdered scores of Palestinian civilians
in the past few days.
-
- In Iraq, the civilian daily death toll has risen above
100.
-
- These dead are not Hezbollah militia. They are not Hamas
militia. They are not al-Qaeda or Sunni insurgents. They are civilians.
-
- Frustrated by Hezbollah, Israel is lashing out at hapless
civilians, knowing that the U.S. will protect Israel from UN Security Council
condemnation.
-
- Frustrated by Sunni insurgents, the U.S. has instigated
sectarian strife.
-
- Bush has stonewalled the UN, our European allies, and
the Lebanese prime minister, all of whom are calling and pleading for Bush
to pressure the Israelis to stop their cowardly slaughter from the air
of Lebanese civilians.
-
- The Guardian reports that Bush gave Israel the green
light to attack Lebanon and has given Olmert another week to pound Lebanon.
-
- U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice has announced that
she will go to the Middle East to resolve "the crisis" when it
is appropriate. Apparently, the appropriate time is not when people are
dying and a country, which had only just recovered from the last Israeli
invasion, is again being bombed into rubble.
-
- How many more war crimes must Israel commit before Bush
and Condi Rice put aside their indifference?
-
- On July 19, the Israelis turned their air attack on the
Christian area of Beirut. The Lebanese Christians can thank the American
evangelical Rev. John Hagee, who has thrown his 18,000 member Texas church
behind Israeli aggression.
-
- Bush cannot claim public support for his indifference.
-
- As of noon July 19, 800,000 people had participated in
CNN's Quick Vote, with the result that 55 percent oppose Israel's attack
on Lebanon. This result is despite the fact that U.S. television reporting
explains the news from the Israeli perspective.
-
- Similarly, in Israel a survey published by Israeli daily
newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth showed 53 percent of Israelis polled said Israel
should hold negotiations to secure the release of the Israeli soldier captured
in Gaza, while 43 percent backed a military operation.
-
- A poll taken by the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reports
that 28 percent of Israelis believe Israel should immediately stop bombing
Lebanon, compared to 7 percent who believe that the bombing should continue
until the captured soldiers are freed, and 14 percent who believe bombing
should continue until Lebanon agrees to disarm Hezbollah a task that Israel's
invasion has made more impossible than ever.
-
- If these polls are reliable, one can conclude that the
U.S. and Israeli populations are more moral, and more concerned with human
life, than are the leaders of the two countries.
-
- Neither can Bush claim that he is supporting Israel because
he is Israel's friend. If Bush were Israel's friend, he would not have
given a green light to Israel's aggression, which will create more hatred
of Israel.
-
- As a number of Israeli writers have pointed out, Israel
has shown tooth and claw to its Arab neighbors for decades to no avail.
-
- Writing in Ha'aretz, Yitzhak Laor notes that Israel's
problems are not the result of insufficient bombing and destruction of
Arab populations. Yet, once again Israeli militants are "enlarging
the circle of hostilities, including harming civilians. What Israel's 'strategists'
have to offer is the destruction of yet another country."
-
- Laor says the Americans can do this in Iraq with less
consequence for themselves, because "the Americans do not intend to
live in this region." Israelis cannot afford to show only tooth and
claw to their neighbors, because "we do live here."
-
- It sometimes seems Bush goes beyond indifference to contentment
with the slaughter of Muslim civilians. Bush has even come across as gleeful
as if he is on a dove hunt in a baited Texas field where joy resides in
the killing of countless birds.
-
- Many Muslims believe that Bush and Israel see them as
animals to be slain. On July 17, neocon John Bolton, Bush's unconfirmed
ambassador to the UN, gave credence to this Muslim belief when he announced
that Israelis killed by terrorists were more important than the Lebanese
civilians killed by Israel. Bolton said that there is no "moral equivalence"
between Lebanese civilians killed by Israel and Israeli civilians killed
by Muslim terrorists: "It's simply not the same thing to say that
it's the same act to deliberately target innocent civilians, to desire
their deaths, to fire rockets and use explosive devices or kidnapping versus
the sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense."
-
- In Bolton's sick mind, Lebanese civilians are not experiencing
terrorism when Israel deliberately targets them and drops high explosives
on their apartment buildings, streets, bridges, and power plants, and bombs
the Beirut International Airport. This, says Bolton, is Israel acting in
self-defense.
-
- If Israel grabs Palestinian or Lebanese land and murders
civilians, that is "self-defense," but if someone responds to
Israeli aggression with a rocket, that is "Muslim terrorism."
-
- The world is sick of this double-standard. Unfortunately,
not enough Americans and Israelis are.
-
- Consequently, conflict will continue and escalate. Laor
writes that "the director of the American Jewish Committee's Israel/Middle
East Office, Eran Lerman, is already recommending going to war against
Syria."
-
- And so are the American neoconservatives who control
the Bush administration, Washington think tanks, and media positions once
held by true American conservatives.
-
- Isolated in their evil, the neoconservatives are frantically
and shrilly demanding that Bush join Israel in military attacks on Syria
and Iran in order to "build democracy" and to clear the Middle
East of any opposition to Israel's unbridled self-interest. The crazed
David Horowitz writes that "Israel is doing the work of the rest of
the civilized world."
-
- Neoconservatives believe that the U.S. and Israel can
extirpate Islam with fire and sword and that the present opportunity to
escalate the current conflict into generalized war in the Middle East must
not be missed.
-
- Neocon warmongers have stolen the conservative name,
the Republican Party, and a portion of the evangelical movement.
-
- Are Americans too inattentive and too brainwashed to
prevent their moronic president and his neocon government from initiating
a dangerous war?
-
- -------
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- Dr. Roberts is John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for
Political Economy and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. He
is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a former assistant
secretary of the U.S. Treasury. He is the co-author of The Tyranny of Good
Intentions.
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